Computer Arts Projects issue 83

You’ve worked hard to make contacts, shown your portfolio to the right people and eventually persuaded someone to pay you to do what you love doing: designing. Now the hard work begins.

When that brief from your prized client arrives in your inbox, you can do one of two things: panic and approach the job without waiting to pause for breath; or carefully read through your brief and approach the job in a calm and collected way.

Everyone in the design industry responds to briefs in different ways and the way in which you handle them will depend on many factors: the time in which you have to turn the work around, the juggling you have to do in terms of other jobs, even the kind of mood you’re in when the brief arrives.

In this issue of Computer Arts Projects we take a look at the whole process of dealing with design briefs. We ask the experts how they do it, look at right and wrong ways of approaching briefs and dissect some recent work to learn how the designers involved got started.

On top of all that, if you’re itching to get cracking on some work of your own, enter our competition to create our cover, and you could win a fantastic prize.

Dom Hall, Editor

FEATURES

Showcase
Emerging and established designers explain how they tackled a range of creative briefs

Cover designs
Four leading designers talk us through the process of creating a would-be illustration for this month's cover

Dealing with briefs
What is a brief and how do you deal with it? We ask industry experts for tips, secrets and advice to get you going

Insider tips
Ten brilliant pieces of advice on how to tackle any creative brief, from designer and author Adrian Shaughnessy

Read the small print
Once you've received your brief, you need to make sure you're getting a fair price for your work – here's how…

Find out more
If you're still hitting a brick wall, find out more with our comprehensive reading list

CASE STUDIES

Martin Andersen
The record cover designer who once worked alongside V23's Vaughan Oliver explains how to keep clients onside

Red Bee Media
Find out how Red Bee Media interpreted a brief to help ITV2 go green

Checkland Kindleysides
Silhouettes, pulses of light, planets… design group Checkland Kindleysides on creating an oasis for music hardware group Roland

TUTORIALS

Showing off
Knock your clients' socks off and present your work using a combination of Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator

Flipping fantastic
Find out how to create an online portfolio of your work that your prospective clients can flip through just like a magazine

Identity refresh
Step-by-step guide through all the stages of a standard identity-refresh job

Editorial illustration
How do our contributors come up with the fantastic illustrations we feature every month? Find out in this tutorial

Print design
Use Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXPress to create a perfect promotional leaflet in our step-by-step print-design guide

Mind mapping
Once the briefs start flooding in, find out how to successfully plan your project

ON THE CD

• ConceptDraw MINDMAP 3.5 FULL PRODUCT (Mac and PC)

• All of Red Bee Media's ITV idents

• Royalty-free images

• Book extracts from No Brief – Graphic Designers' Personal Projects

...and much more!